Gates Package — page 1112

ibout how I thought personal computers The Road Ahead, it is fundamentally about digital tools is here to stay--we've seen huge improvements in quality and features. These advancements will only continue in the years ahead as both the hardware and software get better. We're just at the beginning of this new era of digitization. The more we use digital tools, the more feedback we get about how to make them better--and the more creative we'll be about how we can use them to improve our lives. The first book I wrote, The Road Ahead, was all about how I thought personal computers and the internet would shape the future. It came out in 1995, and although I didn't nail all of my predictions (I thought digital agents would be almost as good as human assistants by now), I also got some key things right (we now have video on demand and computers that fit in our pockets). This is a very different book. But just like The Road Ahead, it is fundamentally about how innovation can solve big problems, and so I wanted to share some thoughts about how technology will change our lives even faster because we had to rethink our approaches during the pandemic. *** One of my favorite authors, Vaclav Smil, has this riff he uses in several books. He tells you about a young woman who wakes up and drinks a mug of instant coffee before taking a subway to work. When she gets to the office, she takes an elevator to the tenth floor and stops to grab a Coca-Cola from the vending machine on the way to her desk. The plot twist is that the situation he's describing takes place in the 1880s, not the modern era. When I first heard his riff years ago, I was struck by how familiar the scene Smil described was. But when I read it again during the pandemic, it felt for the first time as if he was describing the past (although not the part about drinking a Coke in the middle of the workday!).